USA: soldiers refuse to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan

This 2013 video is called Winter Soldier, Iraq Veterans Against The War Pt 1.

By Simon Assaf in Britain:

US troops refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan

‘One weekend a month, two weeks a year. My ass.’ [US] National Guardsmen in Iraq express their frustration at their endless deployment.

Tim Richard and Carl Webb, two war resisters, spoke to Simon Assaf about why there is a growing revolt against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars inside the US army

Some object morally to the war, some politically, others have already completed tours of duty and were revolted by their experiences as an occupying army.

US military deserters have many reasons to refuse to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan.

They are joining a growing army of soldiers who prefer to go to jail or face exile rather than fight in a war they oppose.

About 20 US war resisters have applied for refugee status in Canada.

Assasinations in Iraq: here.

US Marines in Ramadi, Iraq: here.

Belgium: big terns’ breeding colony online

From BirdLife:

Belgian terns go online!

04-07-2004

Birdwatchers can now visit the largest breeding colony of terns in Western Europe with a simple mouse click, thanks to two new sophisticated web cams installed by Natuurpunt (part of BirdLife Belgium).

The expansion of the port of Zeebrugge in Belgium has not only attracted shipping, but also large numbers of terns.

In less than 10 years, the peninsula at the east side of the port has been colonised in large numbers by three species.

In 2004, over 7,000 pairs of terns bred at the port: 4,067 Sandwich Terns Sterna sandvicensis (around 2% of the world population); 3,052 Common Terns S. hirundo; and 172 pairs of Little Terns S. albifrons.

The location of the tern peninsula may be a blessing for the birds (situated in the port’s security there is no public access), but nature lovers have had to wait until now to admire the birds.

Besides live video pictures of the terns, the web site also contains a wealth of other useful information. For further information please contact Bart Slabbinck, Coastal Manager at Natuurpunt (bart.slabbinck@natuurpunt.be).

Take a look for yourself here.

USA: judge: navy, don’t harm whales with sonar

The British Broadcasting Corporation reports:

US Navy in sonar ban over whales

Whales use sound waves to navigate, hunt and communicate

A federal judge in California has ordered the US Navy to temporarily stop using sonar equipment because it might harm whales and other sea mammals.

Environmentalists applied for the restraining order to cover a Pacific warfare exercise off Hawaii’s coast.

The US Department of Defense had earlier exempted the navy from another law aimed at protecting sea mammals against the use of sonar equipment.

See also here.

British navy sonar kills whales: here.

Scotland: will bird species vanish?

This is an Eurasian curlew video.

From The Scotsman:

Will these birds vanish from Scotland?

JONATHAN LESSWARE

THE Scottish populations of seven species of bird have significantly declined in the past decade, according to a new report.

Numbers of kestrel, lapwing [see also here] and curlew plummeted by between a quarter and almost half between 1994 and 2005 while oystercatcher numbers fell by 22 per cent and the meadow pipit saw a drop of 18 per cent.

All five birds are on the “amber” warning list because of fears that their populations will decline further in future.

The Breeding Bird Survey, which is administered by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), also saw the number of swifts fall by 34 per cent and hooded crows drop by 37 per cent, although their decline has not been over a long enough period to put them on a warning list.

France: earliest depiction of American pumpkin

From Annals of Botany:

The genus Cucurbita (pumpkin, squash, gourd) is native to the Americas and diffused to other continents subsequent to the European contact in 1492.

For many years, the earliest images of this genus in Europe that were known to cucurbit specialists were the two illustrations of C. pepo pumpkins that were published in Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium, 1542.

Images of fruits of two Cucurbita species, drawn between 1515 and 1518, were recently discovered in the Villa Farnesina in Rome.

• Findings An even earlier image of Cucurbita exists in the prayer book, Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, illustrated by Jean Bourdichon in Touraine, France, between 1503 and 1508.

This image, which shows a living branch bearing flowers and fruits, had not been examined and analysed by cucurbit specialists until now.

The image is identified as depicting Cucurbita pepo subsp. texana.

Unlike some of the fruits of Cucurbita depicted in the Villa Farnesina a decade later, this image does not depict an esculent and does not constitute evidence of early European contact with New World agriculture.

Based on the descriptive, ecological and geographical accounts of C. pepo subsp. texana in the wild, the idea is considered that the image was based on an offspring of a plant found growing along the Gulf Coast of what is now the United States.

The Cucurbits of Mediterranean Antiquity: Identification of Taxa from Ancient Images and Descriptions: here.

Related articles

• 11 Facts About Pumpkins

USA: Valerie Plame-Cheney-Bush uranium scandal which started Iraq war

From the National Journal (USA):

Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.

Monday, July 3, 2006

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president’s statement.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

See also here.

From the Google cache, 7/7/05:

The Valerie Plame-“Saddam bought uranium in Niger” forgery scandal in the United States was part of the web of lies to justify George W. Bush’s war in Iraq with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction as its pretext.

When US ambassador Wilson unmasked the “Niger documents” as a forgery, as a revenge his wife was unmasked as a CIA agent.

A crime according to US law; by top level Bush aide Karl Rove, ambassador Wilson (who spoke about Rove “frog marched out of the White House”) and many US bloggers say.

See also here.

Niger and uranium: here.

London Wassily Kandinsky exhibition

From London daily The Morning Star:

Modern tensions

(Tuesday 04 July 2006)

Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction
Tate Modern, London SE1

EXHIBITION: CHRISTINE LINDEY reveals that Kandinsky was a curious traditionalist who pushed the boundaries of modern art.

Abstraction is now just one of many ways in which an artist might work.

But, just before the first world war, when it was pioneered primarily by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, it was seen as the final, radical step to liberate art from the ancient yoke of description.

Most artists and their publics were baffled and realism versus abstraction was fiercely debated in the first half of the 20th century and beyond, especially among the left, where it was often accused of taking a socially irresponsible “art for art’s sake” stance.

The problems were huge. How to invent forms which don’t remind us of the visible world? How can these forms go beyond decoration to carry meaning?

How can the viewer know what these meanings are?

By concentrating on Wassily Kandinsky’s struggle to resolve these, this exhibition invites you to puzzle out the residue of motifs from the early representational works in the later abstract ones.

Is that a rainbow, jagged mountain tops, the arched backs of horse and rider? …

The wider social and political contexts of the two decades spanned by the exhibition are also virtually ignored, except to hint at the darkness of the Bolshevik revolution, which is seen only from the point of view of their effects on him as an individual.

The first world war is barely mentioned. The civil war not at all.

We are only invited to sympathise that his inherited private wealth was confiscated during the revolution.

That the Marxist constructivists disagreed with Kandinsky’s aesthetic is not surprising.

Although undoubtedly a major formal innovator, he had never relinquished the reactionary political outlooks of his bourgeois youth.

As a law and economics student in 1880s Moscow, he had adopted the anti-Marxist views of his teachers Bulgakov and Berdyaev, who preached an anti-materialism based on a pseudo-spiritual quest for the Russian soul through a sentimental veneration for the authenticity of serf society.

In 1907, he discovered theosophy and his artistic credo, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, is full of mumbo-jumbo about humanity consisting of a triangle, with most of us as an ignorant, unenlightened majority at its wide base with the artist at its pinnacle, being its sole hope of spiritual salvation. …

Yet, as a 20th century modernist, he was desperate to evade the previous century.

Are the paintings so busy because the work ethic compels him to compensate for their lack of skill?

Are these the screams of a theory-bound lawyer envious of Bohemian spontaneity?

Perhaps it is because they convey these tensions that his works have now become so well-liked and so frequently reproduced.

Exhibition runs until October 1.